The increasing prominence of interpersonal violence and terrorism in recent years has led many social scientists to study the effect of media violence on children. Television programming with its heavy emphasis on interpersonal violence has been assigned a role by many both in inciting aggression and in teaching viewers specific techniques of aggressive behavior. A large body of both laboratory (Bandura, 1973) and field studies (Chaffee, 1972) now exist that support this contention. Amoung the most important project has been the Eron, Huesmann, Lefkowitz and Walder (1972) ten year longitudinal study that provided evidence of a causal relation between boys' violence viewing and their later aggressiveness. The theory is that viewers imitate the behaviors of aggressive models with whom they identify (Bandura, 1973). However, the causal relation needs to be elaborated, the role of various parental and cognitive factors in mediating the modeling effect needs to be investigated, and the extent to which these effects vary across cultures needs to be discovered. At this time we are conducting a three year longitudinal study of 700 first and third graders in the Chicago area. We propose to extend this study to include samples of children from five other countries in which we have colleagues willing to co-operate. Data will be collected on the children's aggressiveness, TV viewing habits, social and cognitive skills; and on the parents' aggressiveness and child rearing practices. These variables should, of course, vary across the cultures. By obtaining 3 waves of longitudial data on children as young as the proposed subjects, and applying various causal analysis techniques, we will be able to test for the existence of the modeling effect during a period when it should be strongest, and will be able to determine how various parental, social and cognitive factors interact with the modeling of violence in each of the different cultures.